


Just when did the Eye make you monstrous?

by Marayanna



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Archivist Jonathan Sims, Beholding!Jon, Gen, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Jon's powers growing, Martin doesn't make it out of the Lonely, and Jon has to deal with the world where all three of his original assistants are dead, anyway, he does not deal well, no beta we die like archive assistants, original assistant trio, spoilers for ep39 ep119 and ep159, there's no Jonathan Sims & Gertrude Robinson tag what the hell, they're literally two main archivists, with mention of Daisy Basira and Melanie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:29:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22851775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marayanna/pseuds/Marayanna
Summary: Jon thinks how amusing it must be for the Beholding, the god of knowledge, to observe him. To see how he keeps struggling and fighting andfailingand only notices what he should have done differently once it’s much too late to change anything. Too late to go after Sasha, too late to apologize to Tim, too late to tell Martin-And it hits him like a punch to the chest, the fact that he has no one left to be trying for.If you go into the Lonely, you are not coming back,Elias said, and was terrifyingly, overwhelmingly right.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Jonathan Sims, Jonathan Sims & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan Sims & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Sasha James & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 19
Kudos: 164





	Just when did the Eye make you monstrous?

_When does it stop?_ _  
The guilt, the misery.  
When does the Eye  
make me monstrous?_

There are three assistants in the beginning.

There are always three assistants in the beginning.

And all of them are taken in the end. Tim is taken by anger, Martin is taken by loneliness and Sasha is simply taken. They have no chance of surviving from the second they step into the Archives for the first time, their countdown ticking away to the soft pulse of Jon’s reading voice.

Martin survives the longest, which is perhaps a surprise. Their kind, bumbling Martin, a loveable pushover, the one who lied in his resume and has no idea what his job should entail half the time. He flourishes under pressure, as it turns out, can be just as cunning as the rest of the avatars. And in his last moments they recognize that, they treat him like a player rather than a pawn, an honor he perhaps does not recognize himself.

But it doesn’t matter, because he gets taken anyway. Because he doesn’t make it out of the Lonely.

Jon goes in and the Archivist goes out, fully marked and empty handed, his heart left somewhere amongst the mists still thick with Martin’s choice and Peter’s murder. _It’s quite fitting death for someone like our Martin_ , Elias says, waiting for him in the Panopticon. _Constantly forgotten, always underestimated, and in the end slinking into shadows to disappear forever_.

And Jon snaps at him, still raw with loss, shouts at Elias, _how dare you, how dare you._ _Martin was kind and strong and invaluable, has always been_. But Elias only smiles at him condescendingly, and it takes Jon long, very long time to realize that the reason Elias’ words hurt so much is not because Elias didn’t realize these things but because he, himself, didn’t. Not until it was too late.

He thinks how amusing it must be for the Beholding, the god of knowledge, to observe him. To see how he keeps struggling and fighting and _failing_ and only notices what he should have done differently once it’s much too late to change anything. Too late to go after Sasha, too late to apologize to Tim, too late to tell Martin-

And it hits him like a punch to the chest, the fact that he has no one left to be trying for. Any remnants of anger or determination he managed to salvage from the Lonely leave him in one, long exhale. All that is left is hollowness, and acceptance.

Elias takes one look at him and _smiles_. He might not know what happened in the land that is not under his god’s jurisdiction but he doesn’t have to. Whatever was sacrificed or taken or lost was worth it because the Archivist has finally, finally given up and Elias can already see all the ways in which he can make him anew.

 _If you go into the Lonely, you are not coming back,_ Elias said, and was terrifyingly, overwhelmingly right.

.

A few days later, Jon finds a picture. He absently wonders if he found it by chance or if someone out there wanted him to do so. Maybe Elias, maybe the Web, maybe the Beholding itself.

Jon doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about many things, these days.

The picture is from his first Institute party as the Head Archivist, the time so bizarrely peaceful he has trouble believing it was real, sometimes. He felt he should go, to show that he cared for his new job, and maybe even to try and mingle a little bit. It’s not like he hated people, despite his attitude. He just wasn’t very good with them. But there were times when he met people who, with patience and effort from both sides, became his friends. Yes, it is almost impossible to imagine now, and certainly hard to remember, but Jon did have friends. He had people who cared for him, once.

Maybe he hoped to find something similar at this party, he doesn’t know anymore. And it certainly was not unpleasant. He got to meet his three assistants in a less official capacity, too, and he remembers he thought they were… agreeable. Like maybe one day they would be patient with him and become his friends, and he would put in the effort and become their friend in return. It had been a nice thought.

He looks at their picture now, the newly minted Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute and his assistants, the four of them side by side, each smiling with various degrees of ease, standing not quite close but not apart either.

But then Sasha was taken and he doesn’t remember if she really smiled at that party anymore. Did she joke with Tim? Or was she shy, avoiding people? Did she listen to Martin ramble about his poetry or was she judgemental, like Jon? Did they have any deeper connection at all, or maybe they just nodded at each other in the archives’ corridors and didn’t care much beyond that? There are shards of knowledge in his mind that he wishes desperately are his memories of her, but objectively knows they are just guesses about who she might have been.

He thinks, maybe, she could have been a person who had freckles. She could have been a person who doodled little flowers in her notepad when she was bored. She could have been a person who laughed almost silently, arms shaking until tears streamed down her cheeks.

She could have been a person who was his friend.

He looks at Sasha’s wrong face for a very, very long time, so long his eyes sting with tears, and when his vision blurs he can almost pretend her image twists into another face, a face he should know, a face that is _right_.

The picture gets crumpled from how hard he’s gripping it, but it doesn’t matter. He’s going to throw it away, anyway. No need for the remains of an era long gone to clutter the Archives, and he’s too numb to find significance in sentimental tokens such as this.

Everybody in this picture is dead, anyway.

.

He visits Tim’s grave once.

It’s very telling that only one of them even _has_ a grave. Sasha and Martin are officially missing and while it _should_ be a problem, it apparently isn’t. Martin had only his mother and she died before him, and Sasha was an orphan with no strong ties anywhere. Tim wasn’t much different, and though Jon couldn’t be there for his funeral, he knew there were depressingly few people present, most of them Institute employees. He feels Tim would be angry about that, too.

They could try to justify it, to claim that their social lives have dwindled due to the amount of archival work and all the stress that came along with it, but Jon knows it would be a lie. The real reason was Elias and his brilliance with choosing people who won’t be missed at all if - _when_ \- they are finally taken.

There are always three assistants in the beginning, after all.

There rarely stay three of them for any longer period of time. 

Jon brings flowers to the cemetery, though he’s not sure why. It’s something that people do, he supposes, and he wants to make an effort for Tim. To do what normal people do, the ones who have boring jobs and families and friends and dreams. They seem to know how to act properly, what to say to be polite, how to smile to be friendly. How to talk and how to listen. Jon was never really good at that. He finds himself wishing that he was, not now, but back when it actually mattered.

But now he makes an effort, one that is years and ends of the world and self sacrificing explosions overdue. He puts the flowers down and feels a momentary pang of embarrassment when it hits him that he doesn’t know what kind of flowers Tim liked. It seems like a thing to know, somehow. Martin would. Sasha, perhaps, would. With his luck, Jon probably chose the ones Tim hated the most. 

He sighs, tired, and feels a pang of old pain in his chest, only for a moment before numbness and resignation washes over him again. Georgie said that he needed anchors once, a lifetime ago, and she was right. But what he didn’t realize back then was that he already _had_ anchors, a team of good people pushed into the nightmare right alongside him. Kind, brave souls who fought for every speck of light in the darkness that was closing in on them, trying to find their way out, and who knows, if they ever actually worked together maybe they would even find it.

But then his anchors were ripped away from him, one after another, and with each one of them he lost a little bit of himself, a little bit of what made him human.

He stands over Tim’s grave, nothing less than a fully realized monster by no other fault than his own, and wonders if there are any words he can possibly say.

He wants to say _Elias is scheming something bigger than ever before and I know I should be afraid but I’m not. Spider webs nearly seal shut the doors to my office when I’m inside for any longer period of time and I don’t know if they want to protect me or contain me. I See and Know people’s fears even without pulling statements from them and it doesn’t matter because it hurts them all the same. I don’t know if I care about all of that anymore._

He wants to say _I loved Martin but I cared about you too_.

But he doesn’t. They are long past the point when any of it would have any meaning at all.

.

Jon wonders about Gertrude. Just what kind of person was she?

She was made the Head Archivist at 20 and that’s, that’s so young. Jon wasn’t much older when the same happened to him, but he still feels a pang of what once might have been a pity for that young unsuspecting woman who one day entered the Institute only to never leave it again, not in a way that matters.

In his mind she’s always a regal, composed, deadly. What kind of person was she – before? The Archives change people, Jon knows that better than most. Was Gertrude like him, snappish and closed-off? Was she friendly and eager to do her best in the new job? All he really knows is that she must have been curious and clever, the first being a requirement to get the job, the second being a requirement to _survive it_.

Out of the countless rituals she stopped, the Desolation was the first one. She was still young, still inexperienced, and yet she took it on herself to save the world and came up with a plan so insidious Jon doesn’t fully understand it even now. And still, she failed.

 _It was the most painful experience of my life_ , Gertrude’s voice immortalized on tape says, and Jon shivers. It’s the voice of a woman who has been the Head Archivist – no, _the Archivist_ \- for fifty years. And Jon does this job for little over four years now, and he… he has felt pain. He touched the Desolation and faced the Spiral, he’s been eaten by the Filth and crushed by the Buried. He has left behind his bones and shards of his sanity. He _knows_ pain better than he ever wished he would, and it’s been _four_ _years_. If Gertrude, after five decades of doing this describes that day as the worst pain she ever felt, then he very dearly wishes he’ll never have to feel it himself.

And it was the first. One.

She says she thought it would be heroic, perhaps thought herself as some kind of savior of humanity. She thought she would end this once and for all.

She burned.

And perhaps the old Gertrude burned down that day. Maybe it was then that the cold, merciless Archivist was born, the one they all learned to fear. He wonders if there was anything she could have done to avoid this fate. If there was anything that could save them, save _her_. Anything to stop her from ever stepping foot into the Institute at all.

He wonders if she, like him, noticed all the things she should have done differently only once it was too late.

He used to despise her methods, back when he still cared about things like these. Now he despises her oblivious refusal to become a monster. She shed enough of her humanity to go toe to toe with the worst of them, and Jon knows intimately that you very rarely need to choose to be a monster in order to become one.

Gertrude had three assistants once, too.

She lost them to her schemes and he lost them to his stupidity, and even though her way made her unforgivable, he still wonders if his is not a worse way for them to go.

.

There are three assistants in the Archives, Melanie, Basira and Daisy, and they all want him dead.

He doesn’t blame them, is relieved even, that all of the pretenses are gone now. No more schemes, no more suspicions and accusations being thrown around and landing on innocent people. Now they all know exactly who the real enemy is, ant it’s him.

He doesn’t say anything when they scream at him, doesn’t react when they assault, he just Looks at them with some of his eyes and waits for it to pass. There are very little things that can actually hurt him anymore, and he’d probably See them coming anyway. His mind is full of whispers, of Statements people from all around the world give him without even knowing they are doing so and will only discover they did it once the nightmares start.

He thinks he’d feel upset, back when he still had any feelings other than the overwhelming need to _Know_. But it’s been a long time since he lost the last people who tried to help him, to anchor him, and he knows that his feelings have gone with them.

He looks at the desperate, fearful faces of his three new assistants and wonders how long will it take for them to get taken as well.

He has a feeling it might be faster if he’s close, so he keeps his distance, as far as he possibly can.

.

And at last, Elias calls for him.

He gives Jon a single, white page, words neatly written in an elegant curve. Jon Knows what it is even before he takes it, but he doesn’t try to fight. He used to fight, he thinks, with every fiber of his being. First for his own humanity, but that failed. Then for the lives of people around him, but that failed too. He didn’t win a single battle in this war, so what was the point of struggling against the last, final step?

Elias smiles with pride when he begins reading and Jon knows it's not him Elias sees anymore, but the herald of the Eye, the chosen harbinger of the New World, the perfect Archivist he created. His smile becomes a laugh, full of elation and joy and _victory,_ and Jon thinks about children’s books and all the things he should have done differently.

**_I. OPEN. THE DOOR._ **

And then it's too late.


End file.
